Planner says mega city reports are inaccurate

City planners have debunked recent reports in a leading British newspaper that China plans to create the world's largest metropolis of 42 million people by merging nine cities in the Pearl River Delta region of Guangdong province.

The Telegraph report of Jan 26 carried extensive quotes from the chief planner of the Guangdong Rural and Urban Planning Institute Ma Xiangming. But Ma said on Jan 27 that the report was a total misrepresentation of his words.

Ma said the correct interpretation of his words is that the province plans to integrate the infrastructural functions of the nine cities. "I never said the cities were going to be merged. Rather, I put forward the notion of urban agglomeration," Ma said in an interview with the Nanfang Daily newspaper.

Ma said the project quoted by the Telegraph is actually a plan released as early as 2008, which aimed to integrate Hong Kong, Macao and the nine cities of the Pearl River Delta into an urban agglomeration.

The Telegraph report said Guangdong is planning to create a 40,960-sq km urban area that is 26 times larger than Greater London.

The new mega city, it said, will cover a large part of China's manufacturing heartland, stretching from Guangzhou to Shenzhen and includes Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Huizhou and Zhaoqing.

The report also mentioned that in the next six years, about 150 major infrastructure projects will mesh the transport, energy, water and telecommunications networks of the nine Chinese cities together, at a cost of about 2 trillion yuan (222 billion euros).

Twenty-nine rail lines, totaling 4,988 km, will be added, cutting rail journeys around the urban area to a maximum of one hour between different city centers. According to the planners, phone bills could also fall by 85 percent and hospitals and schools will get a facelift.

The nine cities mentioned above are collectively referred to as the Pearl River Delta, one of the most developed regions in China. It accounts for less than 14 percent of Guangdong's geographical area, but has more than 61 percent of its population, and one-tenth of China's total GDP.

In its development plan, the South China conglomeration will try to catch up with South Korea by 2020 with its GDP reaching 7.2 trillion yuan and 135,000 per capita.

By 2012, residents within the region will be able to travel around freely with unified travel cards and get easy access to healthcare and other basic facilities in different areas.

"We cannot say that it is 100 percent impossible for the nine cities to merge into one, but that will cost too much in terms of management," said Niu Fengrui, a researcher with the Institute for Urban and Environmental Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, adding that urban agglomeration is a good way to integrate resources and avoid the over expenditure associated with managing mega cities.

The agglomeration is also considered as an effective solution to ease the overload pressure of Guangzhou, and the pattern has been employed in other areas of China as well.

Currently, China has three city zones: The Bohai Economic Rim, Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta, accounting for 40 percent of its GDP.

Infrastructure, especially transportation, was constructed to specially reinforce the connections between the city zones.

In the North, the area around Beijing and Tianjin is being ringed with a network of high-speed railways. A new train link between Beijing and Tianjin allows the 120-km journey to be completed in less than half an hour, providing an axis around which to create a network of feeder cities.

The Yangtze River Delta in the East has also built high-speed railways linking Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou and Nanjing, running at a record-breaking top speed of 416.6km/h. The Hanghou Bay Bridge, connecting Shanghai and Ningbo, East China's most important ports, has been providing direct links between the two key ports.

Despite being the world's most populous country with 1.3 billion people, China still remains one of the least urbanized countries in the world.

Although its level of urbanization increased from 13 percent in 1950 to 41 percent in 2005, according to McKinsey Global Institute, it remains well below the 75 percent levels found in Europe. Even by 2025, after the next wave of rural migrants, the figure is only set to increase to 64 percent.

Fearing that the already crowded big cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing will not be able to cope with more rural migrants, China plans to move greater number of towns into its cities, creating some cities with 500,000 and 1 million people rather than between 5 and 10 million, and forming city clusters.

"It is a much better route to development. These towns have existing infrastructure and distinctive heritage and culture," said Mark Yaolin Wang, professor at the department of resource management and geography at the University of Melbourne.